Earlier in the story, when Valdemar is about to die, the narrator says: “I now feel that I have reached a point of this narrative at which every reader will be startled into… disbelief. It is my business, however, simply to proceed.”

I take that as Poe saying it is his “business” as a writer to let his gruesome and fantastical imagination take us out of realism into an altogether different realm.

Some contemporaries felt this kind of writing was silly.

William Simms wrote that Poe’s “genius was rather curious than valuable- bizarre rather than great or healthful.”

The idea that “genre” writing is curious rather than valuable persists.

But many readers find as much truth in it as any other kind of writing.

After all, isn’t “realism” as much of a literary construct as anything else?